Contracts for Contentious Politics: Day Labor Hall Practices and the City of Cincinnati

Abstract

Using an empirical study of a political protest, this paper examines a set of interdependent contracts symbolizing both the nodes of scalar interaction and the hegemonic nodes of resistance. The study focuses on a contentious political campaign aimed at the City of Cincinnati, a recycling facility, and a day labor temp agency initiated by contracted day laborers who hand-sorted garbage from recycling materials and suffered from adverse working conditions and alleged wage violations. A discussion of the rise of contingent labor through implementation of neoliberal deregulation policies is integrated with Jürgen Habermas' concepts of the lifeworld and the system providing an explanatory framework for understanding lifeworld colonization through flexible labor practices and the subsequent impetus behind the contentious political campaign. Using survey data, the shared lifeworld of day laborers is described. The study also examines how the position of protest participants affected the tactics and outcomes of the contestation. [Key words: day labor, contingent labor, living wage ordinances, Habermas.]